Transcript
Introduction
Patrick
My guest this week is Michael Reece, the chief data scientist for Neuberger Berman. The topic of our conversation is the use of data in the investment process to help cultivate what is commonly referred to as an information edge. I call the episode Tim Cook's dashboard because of an interesting question that Michael poses. If you aren't the best Apple analyst in the world, with Tim Cook's private business dashboard, telling him everything going on in the Apple universe that day, what might that be worth?
Effectively, Michael's goal is to recreate the equivalent of a company dashboard for many businesses helping analysts understand the fundamental health and direction of companies a bit better than the market does. And in so doing, creating an actionable edge. This is a daunting task and you will hear why. It requires both a fundamental understanding of business and of data statistics and methods like machine learning. In our own work, we found machine learning to be useless for predicting future stock prices, but extremely useful for other things like extracting and classifying data.